Laura James: OPEN 2018 last week was an exciting event, not only because of the incredible people the organisers brought together, but because it felt like something new was starting to take off.

There were people from many different organisations, sectors, and backgrounds, and they found sometimes unexpected things in common with each other. Although we heard some big ideas from the stage, it felt like most attendees were actually working on things, and had practical questions and collaborative opportunities they wanted to discuss. To me, the diversity and the blend of pragmatic action and shared big vision feels like a new movement getting off the starting line.

But what is the movement? OPEN 2018 has “platform cooperatives” next to the logo and yet a lot of the most interesting conversations weren’t actually about platform co-ops. It felt like a melange of several things:

• internet technologies
• open source
• open standards and protocols (as distinct from open platforms)
• commons (not just of code, but of knowledge, public space and more); a mixture of collective goods, and public goods (echoing the Public Stack Summit)
• co-operatives, the co-op principles, and the broader co-op movement
• entrepreneurship — people trying new ideas and ventures
• networks and ecosystems of mutual support
• a desire for impact at meaningful scale (looking beyond local activities)
• resilience and distributed systems (in the technical sense)
• equality and fairness, specifically around technology and data

This is a powerful set of ideas.

They are things I’ve been thinking about and working on in different ways for some time, but I didn’t have a clear sense of them as a group or a coherent whole until now.

I wonder whether others would recognise this list as the facets of OPEN 2018?

It all fits together quite coherently, to me at least, although we’ve no catchy phrase to explain it as a whole. “Platform co-operatives” doesn’t quite do it. “Collaborative technology for the cooperative economy” is the event byline, which is good, although maybe not quite the visionary call to action a movement might coalesce around. Oli Sylvester-Bradley talked in his thoughtful introduction about “people and planet before profit” which seemed to resonate with many of us as a grand vision, although it’s perhaps a little vague? Or maybe it sets out a general dream, without defining what this particular community is doing to achieve it. Gary Alexander talked about a movement and a shared vision too: working together for mutual benefit rather than competing; a society organised for the wellbeing of people and planet (not for money and profit). He also helpfully checked what the audience thought about this (positive, but a little mixed), and admitted some of this may be too much like “new age bollocks.” Recently John Elkington, creator of the triple bottom line (where social and environmental factors are considered alongside economic ones), announced earlier this year that it was time to review whether it is still fit for purpose. So maybe we need to thrash out some more specific, compelling and useful framing…

Part of what made it feel like the emergence of a new thing was that, whilst there is a big vision for a new economy, fit for the internet age, still a little vague in some details, it didn’t feel like a hyped up rally where we all unhesitatingly cheered. Even on the main stage, as well as in smaller conversations, critical questions were posed which we do not have answers to. And there was an energy and a focus on practical action as well as reflection and learning.

Of course, there were ways the event could have been better, and I’m sure 2019’s equivalent will be different, more diverse, and maybe more interactive. But it’s quite something to convene across interests in this way and to frame an event which felt so special. Huge thanks and congratulations to Oli, Thomas and the Open.coop team!

Nathan Schneider had questions about the cooperative side of things. Are we using the language of commons, or the language of ownership? Are we escaping ownership, or doubling down on it? As I feel I’m barely on the edge of the cooperative movement, still figuring out how it works, and its relationship to technology, Nathan’s musing on whether this community is part of the traditional co-op movement or something new and different was interesting. I remain astonished how many co-operatives there are around us. In the UK there’s the Coop Group, John Lewis (as I think John Bevan said, you can take a radical stance just by getting your groceries at Waitrose), but also many others such as dairy co-ops. I learned at OPEN2018 that in the US, a surprisingly large proportion of electricity cable networks are co-operatives. I hadn’t realised that Visa and Mastercard were mutuals until early this century. But they are pretty much invisible in everyday life, in conversations about economic growth and enterprise. Cooperatives UK’s 2018 co-op economy report highlights the scale and scope of co-ops in the UK.

Nathan also talked about where we all sit relative to the mainstream, for-profit startup world. Are we doing entrepreneurship but a bit differently? Or are we doing something radically different, entirely away from concepts like disruption?

One of the things I found really encouraging at the conference was the number of enthusiastic initiatives setting out to make it easier to set up and grow co-operatives, with different combinations of toolkits, mentoring, and funding (Platform6, start.coop, incubator.coop, Solidfund, CoopStarter, and more). And boy, are there more ways to get risk financing in the co-op space than I’d realised. There’s paying a regular cash return, investment from other co-ops, token issues, specialist investment houses such as Purpose Ventures; and depending where you are, tax breaks and specialist co-op startup funds. I was surprised how different the co-op startup financing environment is in different countries. Regardless, platform co-ops are out there already, and in diverse sectors — eg. Stocksy, Savvy.coop and Arcade City. There are more tools than ever before to support scalable co-ops too, with collaborative budgeting (eg. Cobudget), decision-making (eg. Loomio), and day to day participation. There are co-ops you can work with on technical stuff, such as Outlandish or the other denizens of CoTech, and co-ops who can help you with other things such as working openly. Coming soon there will be new ways of distributing computing, organised by co-ops like RChain. Of course, there are also support networks and communities of practice, such as Enspiral.

Cristina Flesher Fominaya talked about the words we use, in a great session on narrative and the importance of stories. In particular, she highlighted that some of the most successful campaigns and movements avoided using the words that one might expect to define them; instead, focussing on stories, and getting away from polarising framings such as anti-capitalism (maybe a story about corruption might be more persuasive?). Cristina also highlighted a point I tried to make in my talk earlier that day, that collaboration is not always built on a shared discursive framework, but might involve parties with very different world views and ways of communicating.

I’m delighted to hear there will be an OPEN 2019, and looking forward to it already. (This is also motivating me to make sure that I can show up next year and feel I’ve done something useful in the interim!)

A note on hyphens: I’m sticking with “co-op.” I can’t bring myself to say “coop,” like a place chickens might live, and I think I know enough people who, like me until very recently, don’t know much about co-ops, and would be confused by coops in this business context

Some rights reserved – CC-BY-SA 4.0

Laura James  is the editor of Digital Life Collective

The post Thoughts on OPEN 2018 appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Holochain : The Blockchain picks up a Dimension

Jamie Klinger: Bitcoin’s central mechanism — the Blockchain — is a monumental achievement in computer science. And from that central achievement, many other cryptocurrencies have emerged attempting to improve the model in one way or another. Holochain has come along to further decentralize, maximize efficiency, and allow for all types of interfaces and applications to be built with it.

Holochain harnesses the parallelism of BitTorrent to power fully distributed apps.

Holochain is a data integrity engine for distributed apps

An Engine is “a machine with moving parts that converts power into motion.” (Source: Google)

Data Integrity is what blockchains and torrents have been doing. They make certain that the data on my computer is the same as the data on your computer. They make certain that the order of the data is exactly the same, otherwise there would be a malfunction.

Distributed Apps are apps that run locally on your personal device (as opposed to in the cloud).

https://www.pexels.com/u/lumariia/

A centralized app like Snapchat offers you a small file (the app) to download that sends data through centralized servers.

A decentralized app like TenX runs on a decentralized blockchain (Ethereum).

A distributed app would run locally on your personal device and would offer peer-to-peer connections.

So if Snapchat were a distributed app, you and your friends would all have the (d)app on your phone, and when you send a photo, it would be sent directly to your friends and only to your friends. No intermediary servers. No intermediary blockchain.

Another way of seeing distributed apps are as scripts (executed code) that hook into distributed databases, compiling data.

Holochain allows you to build interoperable apps for communication

https://www.pexels.com/u/gratisography/

If you want to build a Twitter clone on Holochain (which, incidentally, its core team has already started, and it’s called “Clutter”), you decide on the rules for message size, hashtags, and whatever other parameters are important to you. Maybe you decide that for your specific Twitter app, it is crucial to segregate posts by the person’s color preference, so in the creation of your app, you hold a sign-up requirement for people to share their favorite color.

Now, when you post a poll and people begin to respond, you can have their answers sorted automatically by the respondent’s favorite color.

Ok, so you made Twitter with color preferences, we’ll call it Color-Twitter. That’s not the most useful feature in my opinion, so I make a poll asking people to vote on a more useful parameter and gather statistical information. The group votes and they choose age. We then request to the creator of the app to add in this parameter to Color-Twitter. Here’s what happens next.

https://www.pexels.com/u/sebastian/

The app creator likes your idea

Congratulations! The app creator wants to integrate your update! They build the new functionality into the app, but since it is a distributed system, everybody who is using the platform needs to download the latest version.

The founder will run both versions (and hopefully many people will do the same to facilitate the transition) where the users who have upgraded will leave one final tweet saying, “I no longer post here. Find me as HonestlyJamieK on ColAge-Twitter, follow this link.”

Some users may choose to stay behind and continue using Color-Twitter. They will not be able to interact with ColAge-Twitter accounts. But it could be possible in the future that ColAge-Twitter accounts can interact on the old chains of users still running Color-Twitter. This is because the parameters for Color-Twitter have been met by all users, but the parameters of ColAge-Twitter have not been met by all users.

Color-Twitter can only exist as long as there are users running that specific app. If all of Color-Twitter users go offline and/or upgrade to ColAge-Twitter, it will no longer be accessible.

Users who have chosen to use ColAge Twitter are now required to register their age before being able to join..

Once Ceptr — a parent project encompassing Holochains and related tech that would further simplify interoperability — is integrated, it could be fully possible that if another application already holds the information required by this app, Color-Twitter could automatically make a request for access to this parameter. This can be looked at a little bit like an auto-fill feature. In other words, by filling out your age once, you might never have to fill it out again, you would only need to approve access to that information by a specific app that you downloaded.

https://www.pexels.com/u/pixabay/

The app creator does not like your idea

If the creator does not believe that this is the vision of their system, they can refuse to upgrade and remain with Color-Twitter.

Now, the same thing happens as before except that the founder of Color-Twitter is the one who is left behind. I can take the original app’s code, fork it, add the parameter of age, and launch it in holochain as my separate app. People can now use my app to broadcast tweets too if they choose.

Just like in the other example, if my new app follows all of the rules of the Color-Twitter, when someone broadcasts on the ColAge-Twitter app, they can (if they choose) simultaneously broadcast on the Color-Twitter app. As long as the rules of all the apps validation rules (color for Color-Twitter, color+age for ColAge Twitter) are met, you can broadcast across as many apps as you are running; the holochain-equivalent Facebook, Flickr, Slack, etc.

https://www.pexels.com/u/pixabay/

Distributed, not decentralized

Want to post on the Color-Twitter? I hope you’re prepared to share the network load. Holochain apps will be light enough to run on your cell phone and will be efficient enough to only be grabbing the information you request at any given time.

If the system was decentralized, we would require upgraded nodes for ColAge-Twitter to be able to run. With a distributed system, it is entirely individualized and is up to the user base to voluntarily follow along. However, if your dApp is financially sustainable and you want to provide your users with access without requiring them to maintain a shard* of the system, there will be an opportunity for dApp maintainers to run nodes/servers.

*Each app consists of a series of shards distribted across the userbase sharing the serverload, comparable to torrent functionality

https://www.pexels.com/u/kaiquestr/

Lyft & Uber vs La’Zooz & Holochain

La’Zooz was a blockchain-based ridesharing app. It functioned as a self contained system. The network was supported by its mobile app users running the app and earning tokens, who were supported financially by token purchasers, which worked by having drivers accept the tokens. They completely removed the middleman that is Uber. While that project itself has fallen to the wayside, the idea of it seemed completely obvious to anybody who has ever played with blockchain — and it won’t be going away.

Why pay a middleman when the system can be taken entirely out of the hands of a corporation? There actually are a number of very important reasons why Lyft and Uber need to exist today and why the blockchain isn’t ready for them just yet. There are legal challenges, security issues, insurance requirements, etc., that make a purely peer-to-peer system for ridesharing a bit out of reach. But in a few years, we can expect smart contracts to enter the equation and solve many of these problems.

Decentralized and/or Distributed reference systems are right around the corner. We can create parameters for verification of proper insurance, background checks, and any other requirements for potential drivers. This would function similarly to a smart contract, allowing for users to move through to the next level of verification once accepted through the former.

And once the Uber-clone is up and running, somebody can decide to fork it and generate an eco-friendly version which would only support drivers using electric cars. Eco-Uber might cost more, but it would offer a new parameter to its participants.

https://www.pexels.com/u/gratisography/

There Are Too Many Apps!

After Eco-Uber started, somebody created Red-Uber for red cars and Blue-Uber for blue cars. If the driver is subscribed to the Mass-Join-Drivers App, and fits the appropriate driver parameters, they can automatically (with permissions) becomes a driver for all of the latest apps.

For users, imagine someone now has a list of options to choose from (Red-Uber, Blue-Uber, etc) and it’s just too many unimportant choices for them. They don’t care about who drives them from point A to B, they just want to get there quickly.

Just like with Color-Twitter and ColAge-Twitter, if you as a broadcaster meet all of the requirements, you can broadcast to whomever you like, even multiple applications simultaneously.

So the user sends out their lift request to all of the appropriate driving apps. Once the first driver responds to the call, it will ping the user and then automatically cancel all of the other lift requests.

Holochain is like having access to all of the capabilities of all of the Internet apps simultaneously without needing an API, because the languages are entirely compatible. Holochain is the equivalent of having an IFTTT layer built underneath the entire Internet.

It is important to note that some of the deeper features described in this article will require self-describing protocols which have been built into Ceptr, a highly related but (currently) separate sister project.

The Ultimate Dashboard

Today, we are forced to settle for what Facebook’s algorithm decides to show us. Our capabilities for manipulating our feed are extremely limited. With Holochain, we are only limited to the parameters set by the applications. And if you and your friends don’t like those parameters, you can change them with a forked app!

And because the information exists on a layer on top of the app and isn’t held proprietarily, you can mix and match your feeds to your heart’s content. I might create dashboards for all different circumstances and be able to jump between them seamlessly. Everything dog-related from all of my app channels from users who have posted at least 10 times could be one of my dashboards. All pizza-related posts by users with a high reputation level who live within 10km of me could be another dashboard.

Because the information isn’t forced to sit uniquely in each application, the end user can create a customized experience with the parameters of their choosing. The possibilities for data mining and consensus building are endless. End the data-monopolies of Facebook and Google. If we choose to use Holochain, we choose how our information is shared and empower the commons to utilize it for collective growth and understanding.

Sources:

• CEPTR Home
  
• Holochains for Distributed Data Integrity
  
• Arthur Brock’s Personal Web Site | Arthur Brock 

Lead image: https://www.pexels.com/u/invisiblepower/

The post What is Holochain and why does it matter? appeared first on P2P Foundation.

This image is a favourite of network coordinators everywhere. You’ll see it in every presentation about the benefits of decentralisation, and people find it very intuitive that the situation described by the diagram on the right (distributed) is somehow better than the one on the left (centralised). No evil oligarch sitting in the middle controlling everyone’s access to information. No critical nodes that, if destroyed, would break the network.

(It’s a little ironic that most network coordinators then proceed to do something that looks a lot like trying to be the central node in the diagram on the left. If your first instinct is to try and make a map, then spend a minute thinking about what a map is.)

I want to talk about what it feels like to be a node in the diagram on the right. You’re connected to four, maybe five other nodes. Most nodes in the network are several steps away from you. Lots of your connections mostly know the same people. Fundamentally, you don’t really feel like you have a very good idea of what’s going on.

This doesn’t sound so great? But it hints at what the true value of a distributed network is; in most environments where humans are trying to work together to process a lot of knowledge, the overriding problem is not a lack of input, but of effective filters. A librarian exists not because books are precious, but because there are just too many books. We don’t like our central node on the left not because it isn’t efficient – in fact, it’s super efficient – but because we’re afraid the filter they use isn’t the one we want.

So if you’re a network coordinator and you want your network to work effectively so everyone can find the information they’re looking for, what should you tell the people in your network to do? Here are my current best suggestions:

1. don’t worry too much about connecting to lots of people, and strive for diversity over quantity
2. worry primarily about what kind of information you care about – be discerning & review frequently
3. regularly collect that information from the people you’re connected to, and pass it on quickly & clearly
4. connect people that you see are using similar filters
5. spread these principles

Corollary: the most important thing you do in a social network is decide when to press the share button.

In particular, this advice suggests: don’t try and share stuff you think people will like. Focus on your specialisation, hobbies or whatever makes you unusual. Likely for the people you’re connected to, it’s the only way they could ever discover this information. Scrolling past irrelevant things is cheap; finding out quickly about something obscure can be invaluable.

Edward Saperia is Dean of Newspeak House, the London College of Political Technologists. Through a busy programme of events and residential fellowships, it convenes and supports practitioners working on the applications of communications technology throughout the public sector and civil society. Find out more at www.nwspk.com.

Originally published in Edward Saperia’s Facebook
Photo by isabelle.puaut

The post Coordinating Distributed Systems appeared first on P2P Foundation.

“What you can actually see is that certain governments have mastered the use of cyberspace for propaganda purposes. Right? And they are building what I call the Spinternet. The combination of spin, on the one hand, and the Internet on the other. So governments from Russia to China to Iran are actually hiring, training and paying bloggers in order to leave ideological comments and create a lot of ideological blog posts to comment on sensitive political issues. Right?

4:27

So you may wonder, why on Earth are they doing it? Why are they engaging with cyberspace? Well my theory is that it’s happening because censorship actually is less effective than you think it is in many of those places. The moment you put something critical in a blog, even if you manage to ban it immediately, it will still spread around thousands and thousands of other blogs. So the more you block it, the more it emboldens people to actually avoid the censorship and thus win in this cat-and-mouse game. So the only way to control this message is actually to try to spin it and accuse anyone who has written something critical of being, for example, a CIA agent.

5:11

And, again, this is happening quite often. Just to give you an example of how it works in China, for example. There was a big case in February 2009 called “Elude the Cat.” And for those of you who didn’t know, I’ll just give a little summary. So what happened is that a 24-year-old man, a Chinese man, died in prison custody. And police said that it happened because he was playing hide and seek, which is “elude the cat” in Chinese slang, with other inmates and hit his head against the wall, which was not an explanation which sat well with many Chinese bloggers.

5:53

So they immediately began posting a lot of critical comments. In fact, QQ.com, which is a popular Chinese website, had 35,000 comments on this issue within hours. But then authorities did something very smart. Instead of trying to purge these comments, they instead went and reached out to the bloggers. And they basically said, “Look guys. We’d like you to become netizen investigators.” So 500 people applied, and four were selected to actually go and tour the facility in question, and thus inspect it and then blog about it. Within days the entire incident was forgotten, which would have never happened if they simply tried to block the content. People would keep talking about it for weeks.

6:39

And this actually fits with another interesting theory about what’s happening in authoritarian states and in their cyberspace. This is what political scientists call authoritarian deliberation, and it happens when governments are actually reaching out to their critics and letting them engage with each other online. We tend to think that somehow this is going to harm these dictatorships, but in many cases it only strengthens them. And you may wonder why. I’ll just give you a very short list of reasons why authoritarian deliberation may actually help the dictators.

7:15

And first it’s quite simple. Most of them operate in a complete information vacuum. They don’t really have the data they need in order to identify emerging threats facing the regime. So encouraging people to actually go online and share information and data on blogs and wikis is great because otherwise, low level apparatchiks and bureaucrats will continue concealing what’s actually happening in the country, right? So from this perspective, having blogs and wikis produce knowledge has been great.

7:44

Secondly, involving public in any decision making is also great because it helps you to share the blame for the policies which eventually fail. Because they say, “Well look, we asked you, we consulted you, you voted on it. You put it on the front page of your blog. Well, great. You are the one who is to blame.”

8:02

And finally, the purpose of any authoritarian deliberation efforts is usually to increase the legitimacy of the regimes, both at home and abroad. So inviting people to all sorts of public forums, having them participate in decision making, it’s actually great. Because what happens is that then you can actually point to this initiative and say, “Well, we are having a democracy. We are having a forum.”

8:25

Just to give you an example, one of the Russian regions, for example, now involves its citizens in planning its strategy up until year 2020. Right? So they can go online and contribute ideas on what that region would look like by the year 2020. I mean, anyone who has been to Russia would know that there was no planning in Russia for the next month. So having people involved in planning for 2020 is not necessarily going to change anything, because the dictators are still the ones who control the agenda.

8:55

Just to give you an example from Iran, we all heard about the Twitter revolution that happened there, but if you look close enough, you’ll actually see that many of the networks and blogs and Twitter and Facebook were actually operational. They may have become slower, but the activists could still access it and actually argue that having access to them is actually great for many authoritarian states. And it’s great simply because they can gather open source intelligence.

9:24

In the past it would take you weeks, if not months, to identify how Iranian activists connect to each other. Now you actually know how they connect to each other by looking at their Facebook page. I mean KGB, and not just KGB, used to torture in order to actually get this data. Now it’s all available online. (Laughter)”

See the video here:

Photo by F.d.W.

The post How the internet is used for “Authoritarian Deliberation”. appeared first on P2P Foundation.

For years, I’ve been looking beyond the technical and economic limits which we’ve developed during our fast few decades of personal computing and digital networking.  I’ve looked at co-creative potentials envisioned by Internet pioneers, and added ideas on the basic nature of communication and community.  This book reflects all of that research– but in most ways, it’s just a beginning.

Co- creating tech and culture

We can rebuild communications technologies (tools, techniques and systems) to foster the emergence of communities and inter-communities of autonomous peers. It’s an immense challenge, however, because we must displace corporations which marry communities to software platforms based on financially extractive models.

We can foster just and effective dialogue between tech and culture with these open tech goals:

1. All globally valuable communications software should be, or become, freely available to diverse digital networks.

2. Network participants should be able to use any software which meets systemic specifications for protocols or APIs.

Humanity first

I believe that p2p networking technology is crucial to a sustainable future.  However, it won’t get anyone out of the creative and social work we need to do together.

Communication and collaboration are deeply human. People must share ideas and activities to discover common interests, to plan and work fairly together, and to develop true community.

Putting humanity first, we won’t predetermine social tools and techniques according to currently usable software, including our evolving programming languages.  However, we’ll always need to refine tools and techniques through shared experiences with usable software.

Software applications and functions

Many processes described in Peer-to-Peer Digital Networking could be integrated into a small set of signaling and storage applications. However, they’ll probably be explored in various networks before they’re fully realized anywhere. Also, complex projects require coordinating functions which my book doesn’t yet mention. For instance, I’m developing a fractal process management system for objectives with unlimited levels of complexity.

I’m drafting a new paper on the open ecosystem of tools and techniques we need to support p2p organizing, including essential systems such as notifications, scheduling and calendars.  Designers can directly integrate such systems with this book’s networking models.

Coordinated Goals

I’ll openly develop Peer-to-Peer Digital Networking based on feedback, and I’ll use Agreement-Based Organization to help build co-authored versions of its networking models.  Ideally, participation will be open to all sincerely interested people, via distributive network management principles.

Agreement-Based Organization will always be separately available, and both documents will always be licensed for sharing and adaptation.  However, I believe that some form of agreement-based organization will receive increased attention as a component within a co-authored p2p networking model.

I’ll coordinate my goals with harmonious efforts in existing projects and communities such as Value Flows. We’ll only need a small fraction of our co-creative resources to develop open technologies for all people.

How you can help

I want and need feedback on Peer-to-Peer Digital Networking.  I’d especially appreciate if feedback reflects these framing questions:

1. Does this technology create ability for people to communicate or organize?

2. If this technology restricts ability to communicate or organize, should that be a technical standard or a community standard?

Maybe you have ideas I haven’t encountered before!  Feel free to comment directly on the document or email me, and share your thoughts on how we can emerge into an Information Age.

The post Peer-to-Peer Digital Networking: How the Internet Should Work appeared first on P2P Foundation.

The U.S. government allows tax deductible donations to socially beneficial organizations incorporated as non-profits. However, the Internal Revenue Service needs proof that the non-profit corporation is actually operating to benefit society. (Apparently, no such scrutiny is applied to anonymous, for-profit corporations operating in known tax havens).

As a result, a small group of people intending to develop a blighted neighborhood, or provide job training to unemployed adults faces a huge obstacle. They cannot attract tax deductible donations without incorporating and filing voluminous tax documentation annually.

Ioby (In Our Back Yard) provides non-profit, incorporated status to ordinary people who want to do good. It enables accountantless and lawyerless groups to conduct crowdsourcing that is tax deductible for donors.

Ioby is, well, your very own shell corporation.

Extracted from https://www.ioby.org/about

What we do

ioby helps neighbors grow and implement great ideas one block at a time. Our crowd-resourcing platform connects leaders with funding and support to make our neighborhoods safer, greener, more livable and more fun.

ioby believes that it should be easy to make meaningful change “in our backyards” – the positive opposite of NIMBY.

How we do it

ioby uses the concept of crowd-resourcing (a term we coined) to drive projects to success:

       crowdfunding + resource organizing = crowd-resourcing

Crowdfunding is the pooling of small online donations for a cause or project.

Resource organizing is a core tenet of community organizing that considers activists and advocates the best supporters to ensure the success and long-term stewardship of a cause or project.

As a combination of these two, ioby’s platform gives everyone the ability to organize all kinds of capital—cash, social networks, in-kind donations, volunteer time, advocacy—from within the neighborhood to make the neighborhood a better place to live.

Extracted from http://www.shareable.net/blog/iobys-erin-barnes-on-the-nonprofit-advantage-in-civic-crowdfunding

This was really part of our founding initiative. The US Forest Service had done all this research in 2007 on the grassroots groups that stewarded open green space in New York City. They inventoried these groups, and they found that about seventy percent of them are volunteer-run and more than half had annual budgets of less than a thousand dollars.

Our interest was in supporting this civic vanguard in this grassroots, mobilized network of people who just were responding to the urge to protect and care for open spaces and public spaces in cities. By being able to extend our 501(c)3 status through fiscal sponsorship, we’re allowing those groups a couple different things.

One is their donors can write off their donations to those projects. The other is the groups don’t have to feel forced to incorporate because they can use ioby as a fiscal sponsor up to a certain point so they don’t have to have that urge to incorporate. They can stay unincorporated for longer periods of time or possibly even consider incorporating in a different way.

Then I guess the third part is, and I think that this varies depending on groups, so I would say some groups have said that being able to operate under ioby’s fiscal umbrella has, in some ways, legitimized their work in the eye’s of some of their potential donors or supporters. It’s about people’s perceptions of where they’re putting their funding or who they’re throwing their weight behind.

Photo by IvanWalsh.com

Photo by deeje

Photo by Parvin ?( OFF for a while )

The post Project of the Day: IOBY appeared first on P2P Foundation.

What we take away from Somero 2015 is a model and a map of social, economic, and technological change that forces us to rethink and refine the framework of work. And internally, for the Indianos, it is the beginning of a new time with a new way of understanding what las Indias is.

Last night we said goodbye to the last participants from Somero 2015. Somero is meant to be our end-of-summer party and beginning of a new year, but also a succinct “Somero” catalog of the socio-economic change created by technological development. In both categories, it was a great success: we learned so many things and we met many new friends that it has forced us to stop and re-order the main reference points from which we understand reality.

The pattern of the emerging change

Throughout the presentations, interviews, and talks, we gradually discovered a common pattern in the changes in the production of software, objects and appliances, in energy, and in the coming finance system, but also, to the surprise of more than one person, in areas as apparently distant from each other as local development and the new missions and operational capacities of the FFAA. This is a radical change that also became transparent in the global view of the economy and geo-strategy.

It’s a relatively invisible but unstoppable change that uses the keys of what we have called the Direct Economy.

The heart of the change: less scale, more scope, lower cost

This common pattern is an across-the-board reduction in the scale of productive units and the growing centrality of economies of scope. What are economies of scope? The disproportionate improvement of productivity obtained from two things:

• The capacity obtained through the intensive use of multi-purpose machines and systems–3D printers in prototyping, “recyclable” production chains in manufacturing, systems integrated into logistics–of multiplying the diversity of low-cost supply, marking a tendency towards low-cost customization.
• The capacity for reaching, at a low cost, across greater distances by using networks and identifying concrete identarian networks, to make them customized offers.

The result of the balance between large scales that are suffering more and more inefficiencies and a new productive “SME” community that is producing a greater diversity of things, in smaller runs, and selling them globally by differentiating more kinds of customers, is clear: the whole sector of the new “small and global” produces at a lower cost and is simply more efficient.

So the slogan of the change, in any setting, could well be less scale, more scope.

Distributed isn’t decentralized

The main contradiction of this world that we started to map out in Somero 2015 is the tension between the decentralized and the distributed.

The Internet of the giants of scale, the world of finance, and the industrial sector that is still dominant today, are the results of the connection of a series of centralized and centralizing systems. Twitter, Facebook, and Google are such centralized networks that they show the user a single entry page. Volskwagen, Endesa or any other industrial giant are such centralized transnational systems that they can plan not only their margins but updates to their equipment from their providers with their corresponding financial costs. These providers, who live in a true monopsony (a market with a single buyer) have no margin for any other technological innovation than that dictated and funded by the buyer.

But starting at certain scale, decentralized systems not only accumulate more inefficiencies, but turn them into costs that are higher than those of their distributed alternatives. These alternatives are not just more and more competitive in industry and even in the credit market. They are, by definition, more robust and resilient, and with a minimal regulation, as we saw in finance, they have systemic effects that underpin the main path of socio-economic and technological progress in our era: the dissipation of rents.

Additionally, when we joined the logic of distribution to that of free software, the free [of charge] nature of the underlying infrastructure appears easily, and the result is the appearance of resilient and accessible markets, and above all of a social fabric that gives a leading role to the community in the city and in conversation.

The key word is community

And as Juan had already told us on the second day and again remarked in the send-off, the new world doesn’t relate in impersonal ways, talking about “here’s what you should do,” but about many different versions of “here’s what we’re doing,” from many real communities, each one with their own values and ways of being themselves.

Somero 2015 was, above all, a community event. From the first days, we saw the birth of a powerful, imaginative and cohesive development community: that of GNU social. Working in parallel with the seminar of the “Sharing Cities Network,” in less than three days, it made a true show of force by developing the basics of the free and distributed toolbox of the “sharing city.”

But that wasn’t the only community that took shape in those days. The participation of many of our friends of la Matriz, who had jointly rented and organized accommodations and transportation to participate, gave shape to turning An?ovoligo into “las Indias Club.” Their participation in conversations and in software development, their contributions to the development of the event, and their interaction with the speakers were fundamental to everything turning out as marvellously as it did. In the end, as we wanted, we are something closer to a country than a landscape. Now the “Indianos” are not just the members of the cooperatives, but the network of friends of las Indias Club, our “happy few,” our “we,” united by values and ideas, but above all by experiences, feelings, and affections.

Towards Somero 2016

This morning, while the apartment rented by la Matriz was emptying out and its Indianos were leaving for train stations and airports, the other one, that of the cooperators, was ringing with accounts, bills, and telephone calls. Among them were the first preparatory calls for Somero 2016.

We feel that we entered, reinforced and excited, into a new year, our fourteenth year, and into a new stage. This is a stage in which las Indias is no longer only a community with cooperatives but also a Club to think and do together. During the upcoming weeks, we will build its new webpage and we will publicize the first contents published and produced in and as a result of Somero 2015.

Somero 2015 was exciting–it gave us all momentum, filled us with ideas, and let us glimpse a powerful general framework from which many valuable things can be made. None of it would have been possible without all those who came and gave the best of themselves. Endless thanks to everyone!

Translated by Steve Herrick from the original (in Spanish)

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